How To Use Giveaways To Market Your eCommerce Site

For one thing, there are some major competitors like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, all of which operate across many different verticals and often occupy the first few results in a search engine.

And in other niches, there are usually no less than several niche competitors. For example, there are thousands of eCommerce sites selling women’s fashion.

Lastly, product pages can be difficult to rank because they typically have thin content and low engagement, so unless someone is searching for a very specific keyword, they usually won’t rank above standard content. Unless you have a super sexy niche, content marketing can be hard for eCommerce stores.

As a result, getting traffic organically can be difficult, and many eCommerce sites look for direct traffic sources like paid ads, hoping to profit on the margins.

However, working with influencers through giveaways offers a unique way for eCommerce sites to leverage their advantages, make sales, and benefit from long term organic reach as well.

Let’s discuss a few of the ways to make it happen:

Giveaway Options For eCommerce Stores

Two of the advantages of running an eCommerce business are:

You have physical products

You know your costs

This, of course, is much different from a more service-oriented business where the cost of a service delivered may vary significantly, and there is no physical product.

Therefore, you should leverage this. There are a couple of different options to consider for a giveaway that leverages your physical products and knowledge of your margins:

Giveaway product

Giveaway a coupon / voucher

Giveaway money

Let’s discuss them separately.

Product

The benefit of giving away product is that people like products, for the same reason that it’s always a bit more personal to give someone a “real” gift on their birthday instead of a gift certificate. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about any technical details for fulfillment.

Product giveaways work well when products are cheap and can be easily shipped. Here’s a great example of Honey Crystal giving away product by working with a food blogger.

Voucher

Another option is a voucher. With this, you know that the money has to come back to your store, and often when people buy one thing they buy another, so they’ll end up spending more money. Also, if people don’t use the voucher, you haven’t lost any money.

The last option is money. Money is simple. You know exactly what your costs are and don’t have to bother with the technical details of fulfilling a coupon. It’s not very fun and is my least favorite choice for a giveaway, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t still work as a means to build up social media followers and newsletter subscribers. After all, it’s not all that different than spending $100 to acquire people through paid advertising.

Setting Up A Giveaways

There isn’t anything overly technical about delivering the prize – just communicate with the winner and provide them the voucher digitally or ship them the product.

There are a few different tools to handle the first two options. The most known ones are:

Gleam.io – Gleam is actually a suite of growth apps, but one of them focuses on running competitions. It’s free, you can run unlimited competitions with unlimited entries, and it will randomly draw the winner for you. Higher plans have additional customizations.

RaffleCopter – Probably the most well know of the group, also has a free version that accepts unlimited entries and will randomly draw a winner. For higher plans there are a ton of customizations.

KingSumo – This one probably has the least amount of features, costs the most (no free option), and only works for WordPress. But, it’s simple to set up and you can buy it for life if you want.

Whichever option you decide to go with, certainly there is a simple, free way to get a giveaway up and running.

Promoting Your Giveaway

Add viral components to your giveaway (built into most of the tools above)

Directly email people who might be interested

Submit it to giveaway sites

Do paid ads to drive traffic to it

Publish a guest post promoting it

Conclusion

Giveaways have been shown to drive thousands of sign ups for brands in a very cost effective way. The costs are fixed, and you also benefit from the long-term exposure of having a link live on an influencer’s website. If you haven’t, at least, considered it – plan one for the next month and see how it goes!

Dave Schneider contributes a monthly column on Blogging. Dave is the cofounder of NinjaOutreach, an innovative new blogger outreach software for marketers based in Boston, Massachusetts. He writes about blogging for businesses, entrepreneurship, and has a love for travel, having visited over 40 countries.

About Dave Schneider

Dave Schneider contributes a monthly column on Blogging. Dave is the cofounder of NinjaOutreach, an innovative new blogger outreach software for marketers based in Boston, Massachusetts. He writes about blogging for businesses, entrepreneurship, and has a love for travel, having visited over 40 countries.